Friends, our cultural flashpoints have been seen before. They are precedented. Our fathers and mothers in the faith faced a cultural onslaught that makes ours tame by comparison. And they overcame. Yes, often through great suffering and persecution. And we ought to consider their example. 

I think I am becoming more and more known for my phrase, “These are precedented times.” It is one of my missions in life to help people avoid cultural anxiety and panic, the roots of which are often the sense that the world has never before seen the challenges we face, and the fruits of which are things like desperately clinging to bad people and bad ideas (e.g., Donald Trump, “Christian” Nationalism).
That said, there is a sense in which our challenges are new. They are relatively new for us. It is jarring to live in a culture saturated for so long in Christian atmosphere suddenly obsessed with things like cross-dressing and genital mutilation. In the context of the Christian west this is a very new development. But in the context of pagan societies, it is as old as fallen time: androgyny, cross-dressing, and bodily mutilation has always gone hand-in-hand with paganism. You can read all about it here.
Our current cultural upheavals are best seen as symptoms of a deeper problem. The last wisps of Christendom’s oxygen are fading and we are experiencing the re-paganization of the Western world. You can read all about that in Steven Smith’s Pagans & Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac. Or, for a more concrete “on the ground” view, Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites: New Religions For a Godless World. The “old gods” never really went away. They went underground, and they are making a strong reemergence right before our eyes.
And what do they care about? Well, what are our cultural flashpoints? Here are my top three. First, racial discord—how can different peoples coexist and settle their grievances? This is manifest in the rise of Critical Theory, and its answers do more to stoke grievances between people groups than settle them. Abortion makes the top three, too, going by the moniker “bodily autonomy.” And, finally, total sexual autonomy; the right to sleep with whomever one wants, to morph and bend one’s sexual behavior and to mutilate one’s body in essence.
Racial identity, disposal of unwanted children, and free sex. Those are the top priorities for a significant segment of western society—perhaps even half of society.
Here is a CNN report just this week: “Under strict abortion law, Texas had nearly 10,000 more births than expected in last nine months of 2022, research suggests.” The article is a fairly straightforward recitation of the facts, but the online world of progressivism put a pretty strong opinion spin on the story: namely, that this is some kind of tragedy. How awful that ten thousand babies were allowed to be born in the oppressive, theocratic state of Texas! Those babies represent, you see, a violation of a woman’s bodily autonomy.
This all brings me to what I really want to share with you this week. The other day I was reading a translation of a very ancient document and was reminded—and just completely astonished—of how … precedented our times are. It was written in the context of the Greco-Roman pagan world. No one knows for certain the identity of its author (although Charles Hill has argued that it’s Polycarp). It simply says, in Greek: “Mathetes.” That could certainly be his name, but “mathetes” in Greek simply means “Disciple.” It could be a term used to preserve anonymity; it is written by a disciple of Jesus.
“Mathetes” wrote a letter to someone named “Diognetus,” and scholars generally date this letter to around A.D. 130—one thousand, nine hundred years ago. Why did he write it? Because this “Diognetus,” apparently a pagan of some sort, was curious about this newfangled group of people called “Christians.” Mathetes writes:
Since I see the, most excellent Diognetus, exceedingly desirous to learn the mode of worshipping God prevalent among the Christians, and inquiring very carefully and earnestly concerning them, what God they trust in, and what form of religion they observe […] I cordially welcome this thy desire, and I implore God, who enables us both to speak and to hear, to grant to me so to speak, that, above all, I may hear you have been edified, and to you so to hear, that I who speak may have no cause of regret for having done so.
Just think of that. We have a document from the very earliest days of the Christian movement, the days when Christians were an extreme minority often suffering brutal persecution. And the document describes who Christians are.
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When God opens our eyes, and ears, we encounter his majesty. We hang on his words, as some did when he taught in the temple (Luke 19:48), and we testify in awe, with those officers who confessed, “No one ever spoke like this man!” (John 7:46).

Lightning can be majestic. That is, from a safe distance. Or from a secure shelter that frees us from the threat of electrocution, and allows us to enjoy the spectacular show.
The concept of majesty first brings to mind great sights, like distant lightning. Whether it’s a scenic vista of purple mountain majesties, the skyline of a great city, the dazzling beauty of gold or precious jewels, or the grandeur of a royal palace and its decorum, we typically associate the noun majesty, and its adjective majestic, with stunning glimpses, panoramas, and sights.
Majesty captures a greatness, power, and glory that is both impressive and attractive. And as with lightning, what is majestic from a safe distance can be terrifying when right overhead, without shelter. And so it is when the living God showcases his majesty at the Red Sea—his enemies panic with fear (Exodus 14:24), while his people, whom he rescues, know themselves safe and praise his majesty:
In the greatness of your majesty you overthrow your adversaries;you send out your fury; it consumes them like stubble…Who is like you, majestic in holiness,awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?Exodus 15:7, 11
Yet when Scripture mentions the majesty of God, the reference is not exclusively to the visible. Thunder, not only lightning, also may strike us as majestic, when we don’t find ourselves exposed and at risk. And so, as Scripture testifies, God’s voice is majestic.
His words ring out with divine greatness, and tangible goodness, in the ears of his people. His speech is both authoritative and appealing, imposing and attractive. His voice both cuts us to the heart, and makes our hearts thrill. His words wound us in our sin, and we welcome it in the Spirit. God’s majestic words, spoken and written, surprise and delight his people, even as his enemies cower at his thunderings. Their fear is terror; ours is reverent awe and joy.
His lightnings enthrall his saints. As does the thunder of his words.
Greatness of His Word
Consider, first, the greatness of “his majestic voice” (Isaiah 30:30).
No voice speaks with such authority—or anywhere even remotely close to such authority—as the voice of the living God. His words, unlike any other words, are utterly authoritative, and on every possible subject he chooses to address. Like no other mind and mouth, his words are not limited to an area of expertise. His expertise, as God, is all things, without exception.
But the greatness of his word includes not only his right to speak on any given subject (and every subject), but also his ability to speak to the most important subjects and do so extensively, and perfectly, and have the final say. He not only takes up far-reaching, bottomless, eternal, truly great topics, but he never speaks above his head, or out of his depths, as even the world’s greatest minds do when they come to the topics that matter most.
God never speculates. He never overreaches or overextends his knowledge. He never over-speaks. As God, he may publicly address any subject matter he chooses, and with unassailable authority, and he does so perfectly, every time, in all he chooses to say and not say.
In Scripture, he does give us an extensive word, but not an exhaustive one. He chooses to limit his spoken revelation to a first covenant and then a new one, 66 books, and 30,000 verses across the span of a millennium and a half. However, he chooses not (yet) to speak to every possible subject in his created world and beyond, but to speak with both clarity and repetition, despite the trends and undulations of every generation, to the realities that are most timeless and essential. And in doing so, he cues his people in on the subjects and proportions of his focus that prove most important in every time and season.
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Let us never forget key lessons we should have already learnt: to vacate solid granite of Scripture for shifting sands of feelings, impressions, hunches, emotions, sense, reason, circumstances, providences and signs, always results in a knot that is only untangled by grace.

We are called to walk by faith, through which we are also justified. Far too often, believers including mature saints, even in top ecclesiastical posts, seek to further God’s work by resorting to the flesh.
DIY salvation (adversely reviewed) is one of the main points of Genesis 16 – here the holy family, with Abram included and implicated, without jeopardizing his saved status, faithlessly and pragmatically, tosses a carnal spanner in God’s Work.
A catastrophic lapse led to a failed attempt to give the LORD a helping hand in hurrying His world-blessing plan along: with no heir in sight, and beyond all human hope, Sarai’s servant-surrogate Hagar, whom providence put within reach, offered an open door to sire, and adopt, an illicit to-be-son.
Certainly, we can sense the frustration of his wife whose womb Yahweh had shut, with perhaps a hint of blame? It was 10 years down the line from the night God launched His plan in Ur – impatience, sense, reason and sight gave the patriarch a nudge &, with echoes of Eden, Abram listened to his wife.
But, it really does matter how the plan of God moves forward – the Angel of the LORD, with his first appearance on-stage, indicates clearly that the One who sees all & knows the fact-file of our lives, is as interested both in the way of what we do as the what of Jehovah’s work.
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